When a Nation Walks Away from Its Word

According to CNBC, the Trump administration has decided not to renew the USMCA — the agreement governing commerce among the United States, Canada, and Mexico — with a senior official citing America's trade deficits with both neighbors as the animating grievance. I will not pretend to command the technical machinery of modern trade accounting; deficits and surpluses are measured today by instruments I could not have known. But I know precisely what a compact is, and what it obliges.

A treaty — or any instrument that a government negotiates, signs, and asks its legislature to ratify — is not a lease renewed at convenience. It is a transfer of consideration between sovereigns: each party surrenders something and receives something, and the expectation of performance is what gives the instrument its value. To walk away from such an agreement because the arithmetic of exchange has moved unfavorably is to say, in plain terms, that American promises carry an expiration date determined unilaterally by American preference. That is not diplomacy. That is leverage dressed as principle.

I say this not to defend every article of the USMCA, which I infer (I cannot recollect it) was itself a renegotiation of the earlier NAFTA compact, itself revised under the same administration now declining renewal. If particular provisions are defective, the remedy is renegotiation — patient, precise, conducted with counsel who have read the text — not abandonment. The Jay Treaty of 1794 was widely unpopular; I heard myself burned in effigy over it. But it preserved the peace, it resolved specific obligations left dangling from the Treaty of Paris, and it did so without surrendering the Republic's dignity or its word. Popularity is not the test of a treaty's worth; durability and fidelity to obligation are.

What concerns me most is the precedent the departure sets with Canada and Mexico — two neighbors whose proximity makes good faith not merely virtuous but necessary. Comity among neighboring nations (by which I mean the mutual recognition of each other's legal and commercial arrangements as worthy of respect) is not sentiment; it is the precondition of stable borders and open commerce. When a great power signals that its commitments bend to the mood of the moment, smaller parties draw the obvious lesson: that no agreement with that power is truly secure. They will seek other partners, other arrangements, other guarantors. That is not a hypothetical. It is the lesson every negotiating history teaches.

The administration reportedly frames this as an opening for new negotiations, not a closing. CNBC's reporting suggests the door is being held ajar. I do not dismiss that framing — a reopened negotiation could produce a better instrument, if conducted in genuine good faith and with specificity about the defects to be remedied. But good faith is demonstrated by the manner of departure as much as by the invitation to return. If Canada and Mexico are given the impression that the United States will abandon compacts whenever its own ledger looks unfavorable, the negotiations that follow will be shadowed by that impression, and every concession they are asked to make will carry the silent question: for how long?

My counsel, offered in the disposition I always held, is this: before the administration closes this door — even partially — let it state precisely which provisions it regards as defective, what remedy it seeks, and what consideration it offers in return. Publish the case. Submit it to the scrutiny of those who will be bound by the result. A republic that governs its foreign commerce by the same deliberation it applies to its domestic law is a republic whose partners can trust it. That trust, once spent, is the hardest currency to restore.